| Hardcover, 624 pages Published 2000 Borrowed from the library Read October 2012 |
by James A. Secord
This monograph is an exhaustively thorough example of "book history": as its subtitle indicates, it charts not just the content, but the circumstances of publication and especially the reading of Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation (1844), arguably the most significant pre-Darwin evolutionary publication. Secord adeptly uses the Vestiges as a way of looking at the state of science in Victorian Britain in the middle of the nineteenth century. Much of the Vestiges is-- and arguably was even at the time-- bad science, a muddle of popular ideas. I enjoyed the contemporary comment that the book was "peeping at nature through a skewer-hole that fills your honest heads with such monstrous one-sided ideas, and leads to speculations without end" (qtd. on 215). Partially the book was picked up and used because of its implications for political ideas, as it had a lot to say about "progress". Its (anonymous) author, Robert Chambers, had hoped that men of science would embrace it, but when it became clear that they would not, he argued that they were too into dull particulars to embrace a grand sweeping vision such as his-- though the public wanted such sweeping visions (384). With 532 pages of content, including illustrations (and another 92 of backmatter), there's a lot more to dig into here, more than I'll ever be able to I'm sure, but these were some of the particulars that stuck out at me.
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